Sin, Prophecy, and Confession: Dostoevsky, Demons, and the Buried Secret

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In 1921, among Dostoevsky’s private papers, scholars discovered a long-lost chapter from Demons—the notorious “At Tikhon’s,” originally titled “Stavrogin’s Confession.” It had been intended for Part Two, Chapter Nine, serving as a grim prelude to the unhinged violence that would erupt in the latter half of the novel. In it, Stavrogin admits to raping a twelve-year-old girl, an act that drives her to suicide. Although Dostoevsky provided a detailed explanation for including it, the editors of The Russian Messenger refused to serialize such a scandalous episode. As a result, the chapter remained unpublished for the rest of his life.

Demons was written between 1870 and 1872, at a time when Dostoevsky had already completed Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, works that had secured his reputation internationally. Yet his finances were still in dire straits. He was living abroad in self-imposed exile to escape creditors, often relying on advances from publishers to stay afloat. Even far from home, he remained intensely engaged with Russian social and cultural affairs, reading three Russian newspapers in full every day. So when the sensational Nechayev affair broke, it instantly caught his attention—enough to interrupt work on a long-planned project, The Life of a Great Sinner (which he would never finish), and launch instead into what he called a “pamphlet” novel: Demons. We now know that the driving force behind its creation came not only from the horror of the Nechayev case itself, but also from certain formative experiences in Dostoevsky’s own past.

In 1869, a radical student named Sergey Nechayev (here mistakenly “Chadayev” in some accounts) formed a terrorist cell called “The People’s Retribution.” One member, Ivanov, began to object to the group’s more extreme measures and refused to carry out a committee order, even threatening to quit. Nechayev accused him of being an informer and, with the help of other members, lured him to his death on November 21, 1869, before fleeing abroad.

What made the case unusual was the Tsarist government’s response: during its investigation, the authorities recognized its exceptional nature and, in a rare move, made the case files public. The story dominated the Russian press for weeks and was discussed across Europe. It is no coincidence, then, that in Demons, Pyotr Verkhovensky and his “five-man cell” plot the murder of Shatov in ways that closely echo the Nechayev affair—Dostoevsky intended it so. Unlike the murder in Crime and Punishment, which balances philosophical depth with suspense, the killing in Demons is announced well in advance, inevitable rather than mysterious. Dostoevsky’s aim was to examine, in detail: How does a figure like Nechayev come into being? Who bears responsibility? And what awaits Russia in the years to come?

It is often said that the French Revolution shaped the course of human history from the 19th century onward—and, given what followed, the weight of that statement has only grown with time.

Before the Revolution, the French people endured a threefold oppression: the centralized absolutism of the monarchy, the privileges of the feudal aristocracy, and the authority of the Catholic clergy, compounded by the yawning wealth gap brought about by the rise of capitalism. New currents of thought began to emerge. Alongside the Enlightenment rallying cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a deeper undercurrent was the growing spread of atheism.

For French intellectuals, Christianity had two layers. The outer layer consisted of Catholicism’s elaborate rituals and cleverly disguised mechanisms of control—these, they believed, should be discarded. The inner layer included core doctrines such as divine creation, the immortality of the soul, and the Last Judgment—claims they regarded as disproven by science and likewise to be abandoned. Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers embraced deism: the belief that a rational Creator had indeed fashioned the universe but did not interfere with its workings—a view still shared today by some leading physicists. The only surviving remnant of the Christian legacy was its moral framework. And it was precisely this moral question that became the most hotly contested among thinkers—and one of the roots of tragedy in Demons.

Morality, and the extension of morality into the design of an ideal society, was a central topic of the Enlightenment—much like the Hundred Schools of Thought during China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Thinkers went back to first principles to define human nature. Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings are inherently selfish and, in a “state of nature,” live in a perpetual “war of all against all.” Rousseau countered that human nature is fundamentally good and that private property is the root of inequality. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, took the view that individual self-interest benefits society as a whole; yet in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he also argued that humans possess an innate capacity for “sympathy,” upon which a rational social order could be built. Immanuel Kant elevated morality to the status of a categorical imperative—an absolute law as eternal as the starry sky above.

Broadly speaking, these debates produced three main schools of thought on morality:

l No intrinsic good or evil—only calculations of interest. Even acts of charity that seem selfless are ultimately aimed at satisfying deeper needs, such as psychological fulfillment or reputation-building. Representatives of this view include Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, the economic side of Adam Smith, and Hegel.

l Good and evil exist but are independent of religion. Morality can be derived through reason alone. This view is associated with Rousseau, Kant, and the ethical side of Adam Smith.

l Good and evil exist and are inseparable from faith. Dostoevsky stands as the leading figure of this camp.

Although this three-way classification of moral views is subjective and somewhat arbitrary, it offers a quick way to understand both Dostoevsky’s intellectual disputes with his contemporaries and the core tensions in Demons.

In the early 1860s, when Dostoevsky had returned to St. Petersburg to edit the journal Time, a fierce ideological battle erupted in Russia’s intellectual circles. On one side stood the “men of the forties,” aristocratic intellectuals like Herzen and Turgenev; on the other, the “men of the sixties,” plebeian intellectuals led by Chernyshevsky. The latter accused the former of being sentimental, indecisive “superfluous men,” while the former condemned the latter as hot-headed extremists—“irritable men.” At the time, Dostoevsky maintained good relations with both camps: he defended the plight of the aristocratic intelligentsia of the 1840s while also sympathizing with the good intentions of the new generation.

Yet he saw, with particular clarity, their fundamental difference: the “men of the forties” embodied the second moral view—good and evil exist, but morality is independent of religion—whereas the “men of the sixties” embraced the first moral view—there is no good or evil, only material interest. More importantly, Dostoevsky understood that the sixties’ worldview was a direct outgrowth of the forties’ education and influence; the older generation bore responsibility for it. This is why Demons devotes such careful attention to the figure of Stepan Verkhovensky, the liberal intellectual of the 1840s: as a representative of that generation, he must answer for the ideas he passed on to his brilliant pupil, Stavrogin, and to his own son, Pyotr.

Again and again, we circle back to the same question: Can morality be derived from reason alone? Can human beings judge good and evil purely through rational thought? From the history of Russian intellectual life and from Dostoevsky’s own work, his answer is no. Historically, thinkers like Herzen, Belinsky, and Bakunin all, at certain points, embraced the second moral view, but none held to it in the long run. Bakunin quickly became a thoroughgoing nihilist, adopting the first view. Belinsky moved from the second view to the first—following Hegel and Feuerbach—only to show signs of returning to religion, the third view, as death approached. Herzen’s writings remained poetic and ambiguous, wavering between the first and second views, yet in his final letter to his son, he expressed a recognition of religious truth. Stepan Verkhovensky’s last wanderings and conversion in Demons mirror these real-life trajectories—it is no accident, but the fusion of his friends’ intellectual and personal journeys into the fabric of the novel.

In Dostoevsky’s eyes, the second moral view is inherently unstable—this is the central conclusion of Demons. Stepan Verkhovensky deceived himself with it for decades, only to embrace the third view on his deathbed. His pupil and his son, however, began directly with the first view:

“For the first time in my life, I set down my rule of conduct, and it was this: I would neither distinguish nor perceive good and evil. Not only did I lose all feeling for good and evil, but good and evil did not exist—they were nothing but prejudice.”

Shatov, Kirillov, and Pyotr are three avatars of Stavrogin’s worldview. Shatov returns to faith but is murdered by Pyotr’s “five-man cell,” driven by pure Machiavellian calculation without moral restraint. Kirillov, an atheist to the extreme, kills himself to take the blame for Shatov’s death. Stavrogin ultimately commits suicide. Of the four, only Pyotr escapes unscathed. This is not just allegory—it reads like prophecy.

Demons is perhaps Dostoevsky’s most controversial work. It was at one time condemned and banned in the Soviet Union, and even today it remains the least discussed of his novels among general readers. The reasons are many: its blunt and unflinching political commentary, its sprawling cast of complex characters, its chaotic and absurd plotlines—but also the harrowingly realistic horror of certain scenes. Take, for example, the murder of Shatov by the “five-man cell” or Kirillov’s suicide. How does one convey that kind of terror?

A useful comparison might be Johnnie To’s Election 2. In the film’s second half, the streets of Hong Kong lie under the blazing noonday sun, yet the screen is drained to a ghastly pallor. Against a backdrop of sinister music, people butcher one another in pointless violence. The deepest horror comes not from blood or gore, but from the audience’s realization that this is real—that such things have happened and will happen again. Johnnie To has seen it, lived it.

The same is true of Demons. The “five-man cell” feels so chillingly authentic because Dostoevsky had lived through something like it himself.

In 1922, a letter by the poet Apollon Maykov—never sent in its time—was made public, revealing a stunning secret: Dostoevsky had once belonged to a clandestine “seven-man cell” plotting an armed uprising. This took place during the period when he was attending meetings of the Petrashevsky Circle. He had even tried to recruit Maykov, who declined but promised to guard the secret for life—a promise he kept.

We know that because of his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky was interrogated for eight months and brought to Semenovsky Square for a mock execution. Remarkably, despite those long months of investigation, the Tsarist authorities completely overlooked the existence of the “real” rebel faction hidden within the Circle. Fate, perhaps, spared him. Among the first three men brought forward for execution that day—besides Petrashevsky himself—was Nikolai Speshnev, the leader of that secret cell.

There is little doubt that Speshnev inspired, twenty years later, the creation of Demons’ Nikolai Stavrogin. Speshnev was an immensely wealthy landowner, educated in the finest aristocratic tradition of Russia. In his youth he had traveled extensively in Western Europe, mingling with many leading thinkers of the time. He was intelligent, elegant, handsome, and carried himself with noble grace; one admirer said, “If you were to paint the head and archetype of the Savior, he could pose for it.” Speshnev came to the Petrashevsky gatherings with the deliberate aim of recruiting like-minded conspirators. Dostoevsky’s burning indignation over serfdom and the suffering of the lower classes made him an obvious target, and Speshnev drew him into the “seven-man cell.”

Just as in Demons, their plan was to set up a secret printing press to distribute pamphlets. In truth, Dostoevsky’s participation was an impulsive decision. He soon began to feel uneasy, but events quickly outpaced him. One member, Mombelli, even proposed that every member should write a personal dossier, with the stipulation that any traitor would be executed.

According to his physician, for roughly six months before his arrest Dostoevsky was plagued by unexplained anxiety, restlessness, and insomnia. It is not hard to imagine, then, that when the arrest finally came, it must have felt—at least in part—like a kind of release.

Whether it was the incompetence of the authorities or the loyalty of the conspirators, the investigators never uncovered the clandestine cell hidden within the Petrashevsky Circle. At the time, the only people outside the group who knew of its existence were Shatov and Dostoevsky’s elder brother. The secret would not begin to come to light until after 1922.

Seen in this light, returning to that morning at Semenovsky Square, one can imagine the storm of emotions Dostoevsky must have felt before the mock execution. He knew that the members of the secret cell were genuinely “guilty” (by the legal standards of the day), while the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were innocent. Those innocent men could face death with a calm sense of moral superiority, certain they were being executed unjustly. For Dostoevsky and the conspirators, the inner reckoning was far more complex: outwardly, they had not betrayed anyone—but in reality, others were dying because of them. The commutation of the death sentence spared him this immediate moral ordeal, but the guilt stayed with him for life.

This is why the Nechayev affair struck him so deeply. Had the “seven-man cell” not been dismantled by events, it might well have evolved into a Nechayev-style conspiracy. In Demons, the unwritten future, the actual tragedy, and the fictional narrative converge—the novel becomes at once a compounding of horrors drawn from multiple realities and Dostoevsky’s belated act of confession.

On November 10, 1910, Leo Tolstoy slipped away from his home to begin a wandering journey, seeking a place where he might end his life in solitude and silence. By then, radio had girdled the globe, and every stop along his route was reported to the public by newspapers worldwide. A cold turned into pneumonia, forcing him to halt at the little railway station of Astapovo, where he died on November 20.

Tolstoy’s final journey was almost a pixel-perfect mirror of Stepan Verkhovensky’s last wanderings in Demons. If there is a God, then His authorship of this life-script is awe-inspiring—who could have imagined the twin peaks of Russian literature offering each other such an invisible salute across time?

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.